Welcome to The Book Canopy: Read, Enjoy, Discuss.
Do you love to kick off your shoes, lean against a tree, and crack open a good book? Well then — Kick off those shoes, find some shade, and join authors and readers under The Book Canopy for virtual discussions about literature and life. Check below to discover our current selection, upcoming meeting details, and how to buy this month’s book.
Register Here.
Be part of Marh 5’s discussion of Linney Stepp.
Join us.
Be part of March 5’s discussion of Linney Stepp.
Where to purchase Linney Stepp
Linney Stepp can be ordered from your local bookstore — and we’d love that — anywhere in the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
If you’d prefer to shop online — which is also just fine — follow one of the links below.
Diane and her publisher, Ruth Thompson of Saddle Road Press, after deciding on the title for Diane’s novel, Linney Stepp.
A taste of what’s to come….
"In Linney Stepp, acclaimed poet Diane Gilliam gives us the story of a girl who breaks free from the force-field of her family to become herself. When we meet Linney, she is about to be traded for her distant cousin Robbie so that he can help her dad on the farm and she can help his mother keep an eye on Aunt Hesty, who is prone to wandering and revelations.... Before this rich and profound novel is over, what they have learned in exile — how to claim their own authority — will have transformed their lives.
“Set in Appalachian Kentucky in the early 1900s, and illuminated by dreams, myths, and fairy tales, Linney Stepp offers its readers transformation, too. By the novel’s end, Linney has learned how to say NO to what would harm her. She has grown the strength to ask what she needs to ask and say what she needs to say. Her story shows how."
-George Ella Lyon, Kentucky Poet Laureate 2015-2016 and author of With a Hammer for My Heart
EXCERPT FROM LINNEY STEPP
Once I met a doe in the woods in that starving time right between the end of winter and the breaking through of spring. Not a bit of green nowhere, the whole world brown and dry as an old creek bed. The doe looked at me, the purest look you could ever imagine. There wasn’t no asking in it, nothing like that. Liked to broke my heart. I went to get her a cabbage out of the cellar, even though there was only four left and I knew Mama would know somebody’d took one. But the doe was gone when I got back.
I’d dreamed about her the night before Robbie come, and when I seen him standing there looking like that I knew why. I seen Mama flinch when Robbie turned his eyes on her once the wagon was out of sight. I tried to see what she was thinking, but she turned her back and covered her eyes with her right hand, how she does when she’s telling something sad or hard. Daddy had his farmer face on, looking at Robbie’s shoulders and back. Betts was fiddling with her dress and looking over toward the creek, like she’d just got out of all her chores.
They none of them ought to be doing him like that, is what I was thinking. I would never do him like that. I walked towards him real slow, trying to be easy, and picked up his stuff, all pinned up in a quilt, with my good hand.
I didn’t know yet what all was going on. I had seven days of watching Robbie and seeing what it looked like before they told me.
Register Here.
Join us for March 5’s discussion of Linney Stepp.